Culture And Circulation- Literature in Motion in Early Modern India

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The present volume originated in a conference in 2006 at Leiden University in the Netherlands, which brought together a group of scholars who saw the need to better understand the cultural exchanges that were driven by the circulation of writers, poetic forms, and ideas in premodern South Asia. The editors convened a panel entitled "People in Motion, Ideas in Motion: Culture and Circulation in Premodern South Asia" over two days, provoking many interesting nodes of discussion. We have since worked closely with the contributors over a period of years to produce the essays collected here. Not all of the original panellists (there were nearly twenty) are represented, but all helped in the conceptualization of the project. We are particularly thankful to Vasudha Dalmia, Françoise "Nalini Delvoye, Samira Sheikh, Ramya Sreenivasan, and Hugh van Skyhawk for their contribution to the ideas that fuel the essays in the volume.

The Leiden conference marked a moment of taking stock of the history and practice of the study of India's centuries of textual traditions. Several of the scholars working in vernacular languages (especially Hindi) had regularly interacted at a triennial international conference that was often dubbed "the Bhakti conference". Many of us felt that it would be desirable to meet more regularly as well as to engage with wider linguistic terrains and broader questions. One productive outcome of the panel was to fore- ground the links and crossovers between the discrete and sometimes fragmented academic lineages that comprise the field. This volume, which especially foregrounds the early modern period, develops new ideas, but also stands on the shoulders of a pioneering generation of scholars, who brought a wealth of material to light and first charted this relatively unknown terrain.

The sparkling presence of Aditya Behl merits a special tribute. As a discussant, he commented on and summarized the insights from the various papers, and helped to synthesize them in a manner that enormously benefited the present volume. His untimely death in 2009 stopped short his contribution to this field of scholarship, but his sparkling genius still inspires the essays in the volume.

The idea of a timeless traditional India, its people locked in place in unchanging, quaint villages until modernity roused them from their somnolence once a staple of Western representations of the Subcontinent- is so patently at odds with the historical record that one wonders how such imagining could ever have carried force. Indian narratives are filled with the peregrinations of kings and military personnel, poets, scholars, merchants, and adventurers. Religious itinerants in particular were ubiquitous in a culture where many aspirants to spiritual attainment wandered constantly, with only a begging bowl and life's basic necessities at their disposal. The Virashaivas, a militant devotional community in South India that produced some of the finest medieval Kannada poetry, fervently advocated being jangama, mobile, as opposed to sthavara, stationary (and thus overly wedded to the establishment).2 Indian love poetry is unthinkable without the iconic motif of the pathika, the traveler, and the virahini or forlorn beloved anxiously awaiting his safe return.

If centuries of texts are populated by Indians on the move, premodern South Asia itself was also a place one travelled to, a magnet for visitors from virtually all of Eurasia. Examples of this type of mobility abound and cover the entire known history of the region beginning with the people who brought new, Indo-European, languages and composed the Vedas, Hinduism's Ur-texts. "Traditional India" was founded not by locals but by migrants from the northwest. Buddhism-an ancient Indian religion whose adherents were profoundly peripatetic-was periodically revitalized through migrant scholars. When in the fourth century Buddhist communities from China needed access to scriptures, they sent Fa-Hsien on a long mission to collect the important source texts. Islam brought its own migrations. The religion reached India early-via Arab traders to Sind during its very first century-and multiple dynasties of Turkic rulers from Central Asia pulled India into the greater Islamic world. This linkage stimulated additional opportunities for travel, as when the fourteenth-century Moroccan judge Ibn Battuta spent a long period in residence at the court of Muhammad bin Tughlak (r. 1325-51) or when, during the time of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605), India became, with spectacular creative consequences, a haven for Persian literati.5 The same century witnessed unprecedented levels of mercantile exchange in textiles and spices between Europe, South Asia, and destinations further east, following trade routes dating back to at least the third or fourth century. Henceforth India would become a hub for Western expansionist politics. Internal circulation and exchange with the world outside, in short, are defining features of South Asia throughout history.